


Daily Readings

by IndulgentDiscourse



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Discrimination, Fantasy Racism, Multi, Slice of Life, Tarot Cards, Team as Family, caleb is such a dad and he refuses to admit it, molly actually cares very much but he’ll never admit it, on the road
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-05
Updated: 2018-03-05
Packaged: 2019-03-27 06:28:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13875090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IndulgentDiscourse/pseuds/IndulgentDiscourse
Summary: Mollymauk draws a tarot card every morning. The cards are usually right.





	Daily Readings

**Author's Note:**

> What’s up! This is my first time writing for this fandom, and I hope that I got everybody down alright. I actually binged all of season 2 in less than a week and I adore all of these characters. 
> 
> Please let me know what you think of this, I love comments so much, they make my day! I hope you enjoy!

For as long as Molly could remember, he had a morning ritual. As soon as he woke up, he would shuffle his tarot cards, and pull one for his day. It had started out as a simple trick for himself when he joined the carnival, something he did to memorize the cards and their meanings, but he soon found that the cards were more accurate than not. Now it was something he did on instinct, fanning the deck out into a spread around him and letting his fingers hover over the backs of the cards until he felt the one that called to him.

His new companions didn’t make much of a fuss about it, they all had their quirks. Caleb would read until he couldn’t see the page in front of him, read in the back of the wagon up to the moment the motion sickness made him heave. Nott would steal anything shiny she could get her little hands on, including one memorable time she tried to steal the charms right off of Molly’s horns. Fjord hummed sea shanties until it drove them all mad, but refused to sing any over land; he claimed it was bad luck. Beau would do stretches early in the morning and late at night, which wouldn’t be so strange if not for the fact that she waited until everybody was asleep to do them. Jester had the strangest relationship with her god that Molly had never seen in a cleric before. All of them had their quirks and oddities, who was Mollymauk to judge?

* * *

 

They had been traveling through the night, taking turns sleeping in the back of the wagon and taking watch for danger and steering the horse. Molly finished his shift on watch as the dawn began to break over the horizon, and once Caleb relieved him, he collapsed into sleep, not even bothering to take off his boots or coat. Molly awoke to the sound of Nott’s cackling laugh, and the sky overhead was bright blue and sunny, with faint wispy clouds breezing by overhead. Molly took a moment to watch the sky, and then reached into his coat for his cards. Lazily, he rolled onto his side and spread the cards against the wooden floor in a straight line. Propping himself up on a single elbow, he used his other hand to skip over the backs of his cards, just barely skimming over them. He closed his eyes and let the deck tell him what he needed to know. No, not that one, maybe that one- actually, not that one either- aha! Molly pulled the card out of the deck and swept the rest of them back up into a single stack. Holding the card between two fingers, Molly studied the card.

The Four of Cups. The card depicted a grumpy-looking young human sitting under a tree, three cups sitting on the grass beside him, while a floating cloud with a hand sticking out of it offered another cup. Molly ran through the divinatory meanings as he studied the art. _Blended pleasure, novelty, an omen to come..._

As he put the card back and shuffled the deck, Jester peered over the side of the wagon.

“Oh! Good morning, sleepyhead!”

Mollymauk smiled at his fellow tiefling and her enthusiasm that never seemed to damper.

“Good morning to yourself as well! Do you know what time it is?”

Jester leaned around the cart to where Caleb was walking beside the horse and shouted Molly’s query up to him. Caleb said something to Nott, who scrambled from her perch on the horse’s back and along back to Molly, seating herself at Molly’s head where he remained sprawled in the wagon, feeling too lazy to actually sit up.

“You’ve been asleep for a while now,” supplied the little goblin. “Caleb says it’s just about noon.”

“So, it’s high noon?” Fjord drawled from where he was walking on the other side of the cart. Molly couldn’t see what happened, but based on the man’s undignified yelp, and Beau’s raucous laugh from where she was steering the horse, Fjord tripped on something.

Molly decided that it was probably time for him to contribute something to the group, or at the least, let someone else sit in the cart, so he pulled himself up into a sitting position, lashing his tail as he did. As soon as the space was freed up, Jester jumped up next to him, letting her legs dangle over the back of the cart. The two tieflings watched the road pass by for a moment, before Jester turned back to him.

“Can I braid your hair?” She asked, eyes wide and innocent. Molly sighed, but acquiesced, already accepting that his hair would be absolutely ruined by the time that the trickster was done with it. It seemed that his new companions would take some getting used to, but no worse than the carnies he had called his family.

* * *

The day that Molly pulled the Tower had already shaped up to be a rough one. The group had camped out the night before, only discover that what had started out as a clear night became a stormy one. The tent they all shared leaked, dripping water down onto Beau in her sleep, and the roads became a mud pit, near impossible to travel. It seemed that every few feet they moved forwards, the wheels of the cart became stuck again, requiring everybody to get out and push. They decided to push on to the nearest town and stay in an inn for the night, and pick up the traveling the next day when moving forward wasn’t impossible.

Unfortunately, those plans were also ruined. They didn’t even get the name of this little podunk backwoods town, but they only had one inn. With continued difficulty, they pulled the cart up to the front of the inn and hitched the horse, leaving it with feed before stepping into the inn. They stood on the doormat, dripping water and shivering, puddles forming where they stood. Behind the bar, an old human man was reading a book, something that caught Caleb’s eye instantly. The barkeep looked surprised at the sudden influx of patrons, but once their hoods were pulled off, curiosity turned into hostility.

“Out,” barked the barkeep. “I’ll not be havin’ devils and monsters and brutes in me bar! Out with you lot!

Molly bit his tongue at the insults, but out of the corner of his eye he could see Fjord lowering his head, and Jester flinched beside him.

“We’re perfectly good paying customers,” Caleb said, taking a step forward.

The barkeep eyed him over. “Aye, you and the girl are,” he gestured towards Beau, “And the halfling,” Molly could hear Nott hissing quietly under his mask, though he wasn’t certain why.

“I’ll take the three of you on for the night, but these... devils and monsters aren’t welcome.”

“That is not fair!” Jester piped up indignantly. “We have not done anything to you and we have money!”

At her words, the barkeep grabbed a broom and brandished it at her. “Begone, fiend!” He cried, taking a step forwards. Mollymauk stepped forwards to shield Jester as Caleb pulled Nott behind him and Beau reached for her staff. Fjord put a cautionary hand on Beau’s shoulder. His voice was low with anger when he spoke, a barely controlled growl.

“Think it’s best that we leave,” he said, a rumble that Beau felt more than heard. “Don’ want to cause trouble.”

Caleb shifted, turning to leave, eyeing the barkeep as he kept a hand between Nott’s shoulders, ushering her towards the door. “Ja, I think that is for the best.”

The six of them filed out the door, with Molly bringing up the rear. Just as Molly was about to slip out the inn, he gave the barkeep one last look. The response was the man spitting at Mollymauk. “Git,” he growled, shaking the broom. Molly sighed, but obeyed.

It was another cold night. Despite Caleb’s best efforts, he couldn’t get a fire going, but thanks to Fjord’s skill with fixing leaking things, they managed to get the leak in the tent patched up. They sat around inside the tent, Caleb giving Nott an impromptu magic lesson, with Fjord watching intently from the other side of the tent. Beau entertained herself by redoing the ribbon in her hair again and again, while Jester doodled in her sketchbook. Molly pulled his cards out of his coat. It seemed that he didn’t shuffle his car of the day back into the deck, because the Tower greeted him front and center.

People fell from a tall spire as lighting struck the top of it, flames arching up from the blast. _Oppression, misery, calamity,_ his mind supplied. Curling his lip, Molly shuffled the deck before turning onto his side and closing his eyes, trying to ignore the faint throbbing in a few select scars on his body.

* * *

They all had a wide array of skills, a given based on their wide array of backgrounds, but apparently nobody had the skill to identify poisonous plants. To kill the time on the road, Caleb had tasked Nott with gathering and foraging for food, something that the goblin was apparently good at, a skill learned out of desperation from her time surviving in the woods with Caleb. It started out as a good enough day, though Mollymauk did his best to keep an eye on the energy of the group.

The Eight of Swords warned of conflict, and if there was to be any sort of argument, it was most likely to come from him and Beau. Fortunately, the monk hadn’t gotten on any of his nerves for most of the morning. So Molly felt pretty good about the day as it passed on into the early afternoon. He walked beside the cart, occasionally passing wildflowers to Jester as she worked on weaving them into a flower crown. Every twenty or so minutes, according to Caleb, Nott would come scampering out of the woods bordering the road, carrying armfuls of plants or rocks or sticks that she though were neat. This time, she came back carrying handfuls of mushrooms, calling out for Caleb as she ran.

“Look at all these!” Nott spilled the mushrooms onto the cart floor, holding up one as she did. “These are great! They taste good, and there’s a bunch of them out there, too!”

Molly examined one of the mushrooms. They didn’t resemble any of the psychedelic ones he was familiar with, nor any of the edible ones that he’d encountered before. Alarm bells began to go off in his head, but he looked up just in time to watch the goblin shove one in her mouth.

She must have swallowed the damn thing whole, because she bared her pointy teeth at them all in a smile. “Delicious!” She exclaimed, and then her eyes rolled back in her head and she collapsed off the back of the wagon onto the road.

Molly was already racing over, but he was shoved out of the way by Caleb, who scooped the little goblin up. Jester was already readying her healer’s kit, shoving things out of the way. Fjord stopped the cart and came back around, and Beau paced from side to side in the grass, muttering “Fuck, fuck, fuck” with every step she took. Caleb crowded over Nott’s unconscious body, murmuring to her in Zemnian.

“ _Wach auf, Liebling_ ,” he crooned to the little goblin. “ _Komm zurück zu uns, kleines monster. Du wirst ok sein._ ”

Jester pushed him back. “I need room to work,” she snapped. She dug around in her healer’s kit, searching for something to heal the poison in Nott’s little body.

Molly watched, frozen. This wasn’t supposed to happen, the cards were wrong today- another divinatory meaning came to mind, something he’d forgotten- sickness. The Eight of Swords stood for conflict, bad news, and sickness.

Molly was brought to his senses as Nott heaved, expelling the poisonous fungus. Jester wasted no time, shoving medicinal herbs down her throat, forcing her to swallow them. Nott fell back into unconsciousness, limp against the floor of the cart. Everybody watched as Jester cast a spell to heal Nott, the holy symbol of the Traveler glowing brightly from where it was attached to Jester’s hip. Eventually, the blue tiefling sat back on her heels.

“I’ve stabilized her,” she said. “Now she just needs to wake up on her own time.”

They decided to pull the cart to the side for the day and make camp, to give Nott a chance to recover. Everybody—with the exception of Caleb, who remained in the cart with his little friend— began to set up camp. Molly pitched the tent while Fjord built the fire pit and Jester and Beau searched for firewood.

Nott finally stirred as the sun began its descent behind the trees. She shifted her head from side to side, until she opened her eyes. Caleb, needless to say, was ecstatic.

“Oh, thank goodness! How are you feeling?”

Nott took her time sitting up, eyes darting wildly around until they settled back on Caleb.

“Tired,” she murmured. “Guess I shouldn’t have eaten that mushroom.”

Caleb huffed a laugh, but it was one of those laughs that wasn’t truly a laugh, more a sigh than anything jovial. “I suppose that’s true.” He swept the hair away from Nott’s eyes, and the girl settled back down, using his thigh as a pillow. Caleb watched her for a moment, fondly, before turning his gaze up to the sky.

Mollymauk felt as though he was intruding, seeing a moment so close. Despite Caleb’s insistence that Nott was a friend, a blind man would be able to see the paternal affection the wizard held for the girl.

* * *

It was a night of revelry for the group. They had found lodgings in a tavern, and after they chased off a monster that had been terrorizing the village for weeks, they were given an invitation to drink as much as they liked from the barkeep, all on the house. So they drank, and that turned into drinking games where Fjord lost all his copper pieces to Jester, and Beau managed to sequester herself into a dark corner with a pretty girl, and Caleb chatted with the barkeep over a tome of folklore, and then Nott and Jester were dancing on the tables, and Molly found himself giving a... private reading of sorts to a pretty elven man. After returning his cards to his coat and returning his coat to his body, Mollymauk made his way back downstairs to rejoin his friends. Beau glanced away from her companion to raise her mug in a celebratory gesture, and Jester winked conspiratorially at him as he sauntered over to the bar and ordered a whiskey.

Eventually the night quieted, and the one-by-one the six of them retired to the room they shared. The two twin beds had been pushed together, the musty sheets had been stripped off the beds and distributed to people. The room was actually a comfortable temperature for once, due to the open window that sent a breeze rippling through the room occasionally. Molly, as the last of their group to go to bed, had to pick his way across the pile of bodies.

On the bed was Caleb, curled around a snoring Nott. On Caleb’s other side lay Jester, who had her arms wrapped around Fjord’s barrel chest. On the floor, at the foot of the bed, Beau curled under a sheet, her staff and boots leaning against the wall. Molly made his way to the floor next to the bed, beside Fjord. He carefully pulled off his boots and wrapped his swords in his coat, playing the bundle beside him, grabbing a sheet from the pile by the door and a pillow from where it fell off the bed.

As he drifted off, he remembered the card he had drawn for the day: the Ten of Pentacles. It was a nice card, featuring a man and woman standing in the doorway of a house, with a small child and a couple of dogs crowing around their legs. It stood for gains, riches, family. Mollymauk mused over the card and the events of the past weeks and concluded that yes, this group of ragtag people could be considered family. With that, Molly closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep. 

**Author's Note:**

> I just shuffled my own tarot deck and kept shuffling until the mentioned cards fell out. I know that Molly doesn’t have a standard tarot deck, it’s probably a deck of oracle cards, but I wanted to do something involving his cards, because I don’t see a whole lot of stuff about them! Let me know what you think!


End file.
